The big mistake of ‘The Last of Us’: Where are the clickers in the HBO series?

— SPOILERS for the first season of ‘The Last of Us’ —

The first season of ‘The Last of Us’ has come to an end, and with it the journey of Joel and Ellie. A road full of obstacles in a post-apocalyptic world infested with clickers and other creatures created by mutations of the cordyceps fungus… or not? Because, unlike the ‘The Last of Us’ video game, here the infected have been conspicuous by their absence throughout much of the series.

In the first episode we saw how the fungus began to spread and how the population became a kind of violent and athletic zombies, and chaos engulfed the cities as the infected bit more and more people and continued to expand their numbers. Then we live a jump in time, 20 years later, to the Boston quarantine zone, where people lived isolated from monsters. But we were shown that leaving the perimeter was very, very dangerous..

In the second episode we discovered that the city, outside the zone protected by FEDRA, was practically full of mutant creatures, and Joel, Ellie and Tess faced several clickers. Ellie was even bitten by one of them (again), although considering her immunity we already knew there would be no consequences. But the number of infected and their rules of behavior (the fungus spreads its roots throughout the city, interconnecting all clickers like a hive mind) anticipated an importance that they never achieved in the series.

They were key at the end of the second episode, when Tess had to sacrifice herself to dozens of them to save Joel and Ellie, but since then… where have they gone? They had a stellar appearance at the end of episode 1×05 of ‘The Last of Us’, where we met a bigger and more powerful evolved version, the bloated, and where Ellie had to deal with a snapping “gymnast”. Ok, that was good. But what about the rest of the 7 chapters?

The clicker that bites Riley and Ellie in episode 1×07 of ‘The Last of Us’ is a creature from the past, it is a memory of Ellie, as well as the one that bites her mother on the day of her birth seen in the final episode of ‘The Last of Us’. The two attacks we’ve seen in the last 5 episodes have been on flashbacks. Have the clickers gone extinct in these months? They are disappearing?

Actually, the answer is, in short, that his appearance did not suit in terms of script and tone. Clickers are still around, of course, and are sure to be a big fixture in the next season of the HBO Max series, but craig mazin justifies its absence last month (along with more action scenes with looters) as follows:

“In the early, early days, when Neil [Druckmann] and I were talking for the first time about how to adapt it, we had a big discussion about violence. When you’re playing a video game, clickers are a fun puzzle to solve. How do I get through and around them? And violence is part of the method. But On a TV show, if we were constantly gunning down people, since there are no game elements and you are just watching it, it gets a little numb. Violence ceases to be significant.”

And that the violence is “meaningful” has been very important throughout the series in the relationship between Ellie and Joel and in the way we perceive them. For example, in the scene where Ellie shoots a man upon his arrival in Kansas City, in the video game he died instantly. However, in the series he is mortally wounded, crying and begging for his life to an Ellie who is totally paralyzed by horror.

“When he commits the first act of violence, in front of his daughter, she is shocked and horrified and cries. Then he commits a terrible act of violence in front of Ellie and she is not surprised, she is activated. However, there is one thing that We expanded on the show and it was making sure the guy Ellie shoots doesn’t die instantly. That’s where you realize the impact of violence”.

In contrast, once we see that Joel AND Ellie aren’t totally desensitized to violence and that they don’t go around killing everything that moves with impunity in each episode… The series gives us a bloody turn again and changes our perspective on them. Ellie and Joel murder several people in cold blood in the last two chapters, at the end of episode 1×08 of ‘The Last of Us’ and in the last chapter, bringing out again the animal and wild rage that we perceived in them. Joel is especially surprising, capable of killing anyone in order to protect Ellie, no matter if they are unarmed or bleeding to death on the ground.

Perhaps, if we had seen him kill two or three clickers per episode as if nothing, this spiral of violence in the final chapter would not have surprised us so much. There you have to agree with Mazin. But it’s also true that a medium term, with a little more action, wouldn’t have been bad… Right? What do you think?